{"id":5287,"date":"2014-10-02T12:03:48","date_gmt":"2014-10-02T11:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/verityholloway.com\/?p=5287"},"modified":"2014-10-02T12:03:48","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T11:03:48","slug":"cake-or-death-sin-eating-and-other-morbid-confectionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/?p=5287","title":{"rendered":"Cake or Death? Sin-eating and other morbid confectionary"},"content":{"rendered":"

My short story, Cremating Imelda<\/em>, is published in Animal Literary Magazine<\/a> this month. Imelda, a modern hermit\u00a0in an abandoned village on the Norfolk coast, is a woman with a morbid\u00a0talent concerning food \u2013 and mortal sin.<\/p>\n

This is an old fascination of mine:\u00a0the links between death, what we eat, and why.<\/p>\n

For centuries, sin-eating was a funerary tradition grudgingly tolerated by The Church.\u00a0Usually a reviled individual on the edge of society, the sin-eater went\u00a0to funerals and ate\u00a0bread or cake off the coffin, absorbing\u00a0the deceased’s sins and thus allowing them to speed through purgatory. Presumably, they hoped someone would do the same for them, when the time came.<\/p>\n

\"sin-eater\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sin-eating has long fallen out of favour. But there are more recent funerary traditions involving food that still manage to make us uncomfortable. A childhood memory: a\u00a0Greek holiday. I was permitted one treat; anything I chose from the bakery. This bakery was nothing like the ones in England. There wasn’t a single stodgy pink bun or unhappy gingerbread man. Every confection was a miniature ornament\u00a0sprinkled with green pistachio, or shining\u00a0with honey. But what I wanted was inside a glass cabinet. A dish piled with plain brown biscuits. Just flat brown rounds of dough \u2013 nothing to excite a child. Perhaps it was because they were behind glass and therefore forbidden. I knew what I wanted, and I asked for it.<\/p>\n

“Those are not for little girls. Those are for… for…” The baker\u00a0wheeled her hands, searching for the English. “The funeral.”<\/p>\n

\"funeralbiscuit\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Get the child away from the death biscuits. This was a Greek custom, the baker told us. Sweets\u00a0to eat in the presence of the dead. Looking at the mountain of biscuits, I remember thinking the locals must have been dropping like flies. I ended up with some unmemorable cake or other, and the episode went down as further proof that Verity always was ‘a grimly kid’ (to borrow Rossetti’s phrase). But the idea of funeral biscuits fascinated\u00a0me. Why didn’t we do this in England?<\/p>\n

Food has become the awkward aftermath of\u00a0the funeral service.\u00a0I find myself in church hall\u00a0kitchenettes, spending a great deal of time nibbling dismal\u00a0supermarket own-brand Jammie Dodgers\u00a0because it gets me out of talking to anyone. I’ve already stipulated I want gin served at my funeral, partly because everyone secretly hates those undersized cafeteria cups of tea, and also\u00a0because I think a funeral is a place for a sort of human communion. “Take,\u00a0eat: this is my body, which is broken for you:\u00a0this do\u00a0in\u00a0remembrance\u00a0of me.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Trade<\/a><\/p>\n

The Nourishing Death<\/a> blog is a brilliant resource for anyone interested in\u00a0the ways people all over the world honour their dead with food. Because food, in a ritual setting, is communication. In\u00a0Funeral Festivals in America<\/a><\/em>, Jacqueline S. Thursby writes of the funeral biscuit’s role in the Victorian way of death\u00a0in the USA’s Pennsylvania:<\/p>\n

\u2026a prevailing funeral custom was that a young man and young woman would stand on either side of a path that led from the church house to the cemetery. The young woman held a tray of funeral biscuits and sweet cakes; the young man carried a tray of spirits and a cup. As mourners passed by, they received a sweet from the maiden and a sip of spirits from the cup furnished by the young man. A secular communion of sorts, these were ritual behaviors that transcended countries of origin and melded a diverse young nation with the common cords of death, mourning, and tradition. The funeral biscuit served as part of a code representing understood messages of mourning, honor, and remembrance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"ScreenIn England, packaged up in paper and sealed with a blob of black wax, funeral biscuits came in many different flavours\u00a0and shapes. Sometimes the packages bore morbid little poems, practically gallows ballads. One of these is in the Pitt Rivers museum<\/a>. Biscuits for the funeral of Mrs Oliver, died November 7th 1828, aged 52:<\/p>\n

Thee we adore, eternal Name,
\nAnd humbly own to thee,
\nHow feeble is our mortal frame!
\nWhat dying worms we be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All flesh is grass. Enjoy your biscuit.<\/p>\n

It’s little wonder such unflinching\u00a0morbidity is unwelcome in the sanitised funerals of the modern world. But many European cultures still hold on to\u00a0the funeral biscuit. In 2011, a\u00a0Greek family were accidentally fed cocaine-sprinkled funeral biscuits<\/a>, leading to what sounds like a lovely service:<\/p>\n

The elderly bystanders, instead of mourning, began to dance around the dead, and the tears turned to nervous laughter. The cognac was consumed in shots accompanied by the sound of happy toasts, and there were some who started ordering mojito cocktails.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"giftformourners\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So what do you have planned for your send-off? If you could have a sin-eater come to wipe away your deeds, would you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My short story, Cremating Imelda, is published in Animal Literary Magazine this month. Imelda, a modern hermit\u00a0in an abandoned village on the Norfolk coast, is a woman with a morbid\u00a0talent concerning food \u2013 and mortal sin. This is an old … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,14],"class_list":["post-5287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blah-blah-history-blah-blah","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5287"}],"version-history":[{"count":70,"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5372,"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions\/5372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}